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View SlideshowRequest to buy this photoKO SASAKI | THE NEW YORK TIMES PHOTOSCattle abandoned by farmers fleeing the meltdown at the Fukushima nuclear plant almost three years ago now have a champion.

NAMIE, Japan — His might be one of the world’s more quixotic protests.

Angered by what he considers Japan’s attempts to sweep away the inconvenient truths of the
Fukushima nuclear disaster, Masami Yoshizawa has moved back to his ranch in the radioactive no-man’s
land surrounding the devastated plant.

He has no neighbors, but plenty of company: hundreds of abandoned cows that he has vowed to
protect from a government kill order.

A large bulldozer, meant to keep out agricultural officials, stands at the entrance to the newly
renamed Ranch of Hope, guarding a driveway lined with cattle bones and protest signs.

Inside the ranch, bellowing cows spill from the overflowing cattle sheds into the well-worn
pasture, and even trample the yard of the warmly lit farmhouse.

“These cows are living testimony to the human folly here in Fukushima,” said Yoshizawa, 59, who
has a history of protest. “The government wants to kill them because it wants to erase what
happened here and lure Japan back to its pre-accident nuclear status quo. I am not going to let
them.”

Before the disaster, Yoshizawa raised cows for slaughter. But he says there is a difference
between killing cows for food and killing them because they no longer are useful. He thinks the
cows on his ranch, abandoned by him and other farmers fleeing the accident, are as much victims as
the 83,000 humans forced to abandon their homes and live outside the evacuation zone for 21/2
years.

He is worried about his health. A dosage meter near the ranch house reads the equivalent of
about 1.5 times the government-set level for evacuation.

However, he is more fearful that the country will forget about the triple meltdown at the plant
as Japan’s economy shows signs of long-awaited recovery and Tokyo excitedly prepares for the 2020
Olympics.

Yoshizawa does not make himself easy to ignore. He continues to appear in Japanese news media,
maintains a blog with a live webcam of the ranch and holds occasional protests at the headquarters
of the plant’s operator, Tokyo Electric Power Co.